Elizabethan lives / Senses
P
opular culture would have you
believe that all Elizabethans are
smelly (like everyone else living before
Jane Austen, except the Romans). In
reality, the personal and public olfactory
landscape is far more complex.
At one end of the scale, if you are
circumnavigating the world with Francis
Drake in the years 1577–80, it is true
that you will not bathe. Your hair and
clothes will have lice, and you will stink
to high heaven – but so will everyone else
on the ship (as will the ship itself). Your
breath will reek. But in the context of the
psychological pressures of such a voyage,
including the awareness that most of the
crew will die along the way, your ship-
mates’ aroma is the least of your worries.
At the other end of the spectrum,
wealthy people wash themselves daily by
rubbing themselves in clean linen and
washing their hands and faces in clean
water. They immerse themselves
occasionally in hot water carefully
selected for its purity. They wash their
hands before, after and during every
meal. They wash their hair in lye, clean
their teeth with tooth powder, and
sweeten their breath with mouthwashes
and liquorice.
In the presence of a refined lady you
will not smell her body but, rather, the
perfume she is wearing and the orris
root with which her clothes were
powdered while in storage.
Water availability is the key. If you live
in a rented room on the fourth or fifth
floor of an old timber-framed townhouse
it will simply be too much effort to go to
the public conduit to fetch enough water
for a bath, to carry it up the stairs and
then heat it up. In any case, you probably
won’t be able to afford the firewood to
heat the water if you are staying in such
a tenement. Nor will you be able to afford
fresh linen every day to rub yourself
clean. So you will go filthy.The
olfactory
landscape
The wealthy wash
themselves daily; the
masses go filthyThose of a comparable wealth to you
will understand. People of a similar social
standing accept similar conditions. They
smell each other and know that they
themselves smell, too, but they also know
how much it costs to smell like a perfumed
lady or gentleman. Living in close proxim-
ity to one another, and recognising that the
alternatives are unaffordable, they get used
to their own smells and the smells of those
they know.
Much the same can be said for sanitation.
If you don’t have a private water supply, you
won’t be able to build a water closet, even ifIf you’re too poor
to eat, the last thing
you want is the
additional cost
of getting rid of
detritus and faeces
This illustration from 1582 shows women washing,
drying and folding laundry by a stream. Water availabil-
ity was the key to cleanliness in the 16th century